I try and decide which campaign promises match their record. When Obama said he was going to invest in green energy I believed him because it matched his record but when he promised to be post-partisan and play a cleaner more honest brand of politics I didn't because he his history was the opposite.

Romney is saying he will focus on the economy by lowering taxes and regulations and I believe that is what he will do but I doubt it will look a lot like what he is proposing now.

I try and not focus too much on the exact specifics of what they are promising since that tells you more about what their pollsters think than anything else and it will never get passed by congress looking anything like what was promised in the campaign anyways. I don't think that is simply because they will say anything to get elected so much as it is because the legislature not the president writes laws. That and as a group we demand that candidates take hard positions on issues they not really care about and then we are shocked when they are willing to ditch those promises to get what they really want.

I think it part Americans miss the point when it comes to president. We seem to forget that the primary role of the president is to administer the laws passed by congress and to conduct foreign policy. If you have two men running on the exact same platform it still matters which one you elect because their ability to execute and lead may vary widely. We should spend more time looking at proven leadership and less looking at who is promising the most.



I think for the most part the presidents in my life have at least put a lot of effort into delivering what they promised if you are smart enough to look at what their vision is and not at the exact details of every campaign promise. I would say Obama has been the greatest failure on delivering on his promise since his fundamental promise was that he would unite the country but he is the most partisan president I have seen in my life time. W in his last term may have been close but he ran on fighting the war in Iraq not playing nice with the dems.



The candidate matters and I have voted for members of both party at least at the congressional level. If the republican party had nominated someone like Herman Cain I would not vote for him and if the dems were to nominate a moderate I would consider voting for him if I wasn’t that found of the republican but the reality is that with our primary system neither party is doing much in the middle. One of the reasons I vote republican at the presidential level is that in general the republican nominees are more moderate than the democratic ones. How the president manages the various gigantic federal agencies matters and who they put in charge of them matters as well.




No not really it is just the level of scrutiny we put them under that has changed and our eagerness to find some poorly chosen phrase to drag them down. If Kennedy had to live through the same level of scrutiny that modern presidents endure he would have been paralyzed by the number scandals he would have endured. Look at how much grief Clinton got for getting a BJ but Kennedy was passing girls around to staff and no one said boo about it.